Tony Robbin wants us to see the invisible in all its actuality. Working variously as a painter, sculptor, writer and researcher, he has come to make his creative home in the fourth dimension, and beyond. In his 1992 book, Fourfield: Computers, Art, and the Fourth Dimension (one of several lucid and singular books to the author’s credit) Robbin, who was born in 1943, offers something of a personal credo in his opening chapter, which is titled “Einstein’s Cave”, a reference to Plato’s well-known parable in which higher-dimensional reality must be inferred from shadows. Robbin writes:

In the caves, we are forbidden by authority to turn and face the dancers directly, but in fact authority has no real power over us in this matter. We have the ability to see the dancers in their full dimensionality –– to accept the cultivated experience of seeing the fourth dimension as being “out there,” and it is our choice to do so. Failing to make this choice handicaps our ultimate understanding of reality. Our ability to apply four-dimensional geometry as a useful template for experience connects us to the multiplicity of spaces and points of view that implode upon us every day. If culture can teach us to see the third dimension as real, then just a little more culture can teach us to see the fourth dimension as real as well.

From Kazimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky, to Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí, avant-garde artists at the beginning of our epoch took the fourth dimension seriously, but without really sweating the details. Even Marcel Duchamp, who diligently worked through hypergeometry manuals, did so only up to the point of malicious drollery. Tony Robbin, on the other hand, holds a patent on the application of three-dimensional projections of six-dimensional quasicrystals to architecture. His best-known book, Shadows of Reality; the Fourth Dimension in Relativity, Cubism, and Modern Thought (just translated into Chinese), is a primer for climbing the dimensional ladder, from Flatland to esoterica such as entanglement and quantum geometry. The book also chronicles, from an insider’s perspective, the history of 4-d visualization: that is, as diagrams by mathematicians and pedagogues, and as works of art by literally all the important schools of early Modernism. (So far, historians have ignored Robbin’s scrupulously argued mot juste, that Cubism should properly be called “Hypercubism.”)

Nor was Robbin satisfied with a century of attempts to visualize the fourth dimension. In 1980, after mastering the theory but still hungering, as had so many generations of 4-d obsessives, to see the thing itself, he learned of a pioneering computer animation at Brown University: Thomas Banchoff, a mathematician, and Charles Strauss, an engineer had tamed the morphing 3-dimensional projection–– the solid “shadow”–– of a hypercube. They could rotate it at will in hyperspace. (Please note: time is not the fourth spatial dimension, more like an extra dimension. In the rotation of a hypercube, time is the fifth dimension.) Robbin got his hands on the interactive knobs of Banchoff’s million-dollar computer, as well as a copy of his hypercube film, which he took home and studied on a flatbed editing console frame by frame, back and forth, until it took.

The friendship with Banchoff also took, opening the door to the milieu of professional mathematics. Soon Robbin himself had become a pioneer of computer visualization, having learned to code four-dimensional geometry at off hours in computer research labs, and later on his own first-generation workstation. To visualize a tessellation of hypercubes (in which all four dimensions would be continuously packed, as three can be by cubes), Robbin consulted the most renowned geometer in the world, H.S.M. Coxeter, who was delighted to see what had never been seen. On Coxeter’s recommendation, Robbin was invited to present his research at a mathematics conference. Many conferences later, Robbin’s friends, correspondents and collaborators in the math and science realm have proliferated–– from cyberpunk mathematician Rudy Rucker, author of Infinity and the Mind, to maverick cosmologist Roger Penrose, the recent Nobel Prize winner, whom Robbin has consulted about quasicrystals and twistor theory.

Robbin’s collection of experts also includes art historians, such as eminent Leonardo scholar Martin Kemp, and most profoundly, Linda Henderson, whose book The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (1983) placed this mathematics at the very foundation of modern art, and of Robbin’s thinking. Of course, Robbin’s Rolodex is mainly filled with fellow artists–– “Held, Al” being an especially well-thumbed entry. When I asked Robbin if Held, a lifelong friend who had been Robbin’s teacher at Yale, was a mentor, he quipped, “I met him in 1965 and we stole from each other ever since.”

A snapshot of this relationship exists in an article for Arts, where Robbin gave his take on Held’s black and white paintings. With their elegant spatial contradictions, the paintings, wrote Robbin, are “exercises in omni-attentiveness, and the viewer’s capacity for experiencing and enjoying them grows with his tolerance for multiplicity.” Forgiving the skunked “his” (magazine standard of the day), few viewers of any gender could have brought as much tolerance for multiplicity to Held’s studio as Robbin. A few years later, Robbin was to be greatly influenced by the paintings he was writing about here; considering the overt spatial ambition of the work that resulted, mutual thievery might well be considered a factor in Held’s richly colored paintings of the mid-eighties with their whipsawing perspectives.

In 1971, at the time of the article, however, Robbin was not yet making pure geometric abstractions. He was, instead, at the center of a growing movement involving, among others, Robert Kushner, Joyce Kozloff, and Valerie Jaudon, who were meeting to discuss non-Western, feminist, and countercultural approaches that might invigorate contemporary abstraction. As Kushner put it in an essay on Robbin, “We were even willing to accept that taboo word–– decoration.” Robbin’s contributions to what was originally called Pattern Painting (which Robbin still prefers for his work) were sweeping abstract rebuses with motifs and textures derived from the artist’s immersion in Japanese and Persian aesthetics (he had lived in Japan and Iran until age 16). One of these, Japanese Footbridge (1972) is included in the exhibition “With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985,” originating at LA MoCA, (and slated to travel, after a year’s delay, to Bard College in 2021). On a twelve-foot-long golden cloudscape reminiscent of a Zen folding screen, the painting asserts curving rhymes that suggest Islamic tilework, stenciled kimono fabric, and swooping, supersonic speed.

At any rate, Robbin mentions F-111, James Rosenquist’s epic military-consumerist montage, as an influence around this time, although not for its subject matter but for its abrupt transitions. Increasingly, Robbin, like Rosenquist, divided his canvasses into cinematic sequences that stand apart from the symmetrical, fabric-like flattenings common to the works of most of his P&D peers. In 1974-5 Robbin had a solo exhibition of these aggressively compositional paintings at the Whitney Museum, and for the remainder of the decade exhibited at the influential Tibor de Nagy Gallery. His career path was ascendent.

Ironically, it was an observation in Whitney curator Marcia Tucker’s catalogue essay that set Robbin on a new and, to judge by the artworld’s neglect of his later accomplishments, unfashionable trajectory. In “forcefully architectonic” works such as Tonikuni (1972), in which Shinto temple pillars are concatenated with patchwork and aerial views, Tucker detected that “contradictory visual information suggests the complexity of four-dimensional geometry.” Tucker’s inadvertent prophecy sparked some ready tinder in the artist’s mind. Soon Robbin was engaging a physics graduate student to tutor him, equation by equation, through the authoritative textbook on relativistic gravitation–– which is to say, in the four-dimensional reality of the world we live in.

But at the very beginning of his hyper-awakening, a fundamental change was also happening in Robbin’s paintings on their own terms. Even as the authenticity of the artist’s hand along with revisionist cultural politics had, by and large, come to define P&D, Robbin purged references to the non-Western and the handmade and began to compose, as Al Held had been doing, solely with precision lines, curves and planes.

Robbin’s paintings of the later 1970s superimpose four or five cleanly delineated layers which disagree about space. At first Robbin placed darkly contrasted or fully monochrome backgrounds behind vibrantly colored linework: electric blue squares receding like the bent coffers of a barrel vault, yellow double circles shooting across the screen like bullet holes, green L-shaped gnomons in fisheye view, and plenty more, all moving past each other like the multiple exposures of a Dziga Vertov film. In darkly arresting works such as 1976-6, and 1979-3, we may feel caught inside the celluloid itself, adrift in the unspooling frames. Gradually, however, Robbin brought the color of the orthographic (non-perspective) background patterns into dominance, so as to play games of hide and seek. Where the lines intersect, they interrupt and occlude; cut or join. And often the “wrong” background color fills these Boolean and/or/nor mutations, making for irrational, disorienting jumps back to front. Beautiful works such as 1978-3 and 1978-20 seem to compress deep space like Formica marquetry–– and yet they don’t let the viewer off so easily, in that disparate spatial cues warp past the point of integration in a way quite unlike Held’s black and white works, which crisply hold the picture plane however much sliced and reassembled. As critic Carter Ratcliff observed of Robbin’s work of the time in a 1978 essay in Arts, “The irreconcilability of the spatial systems in these paintings has to be recognized as deliberate; that is, Robbin has generated new intentions.”

Robbin was not yet making explicitly four-dimensional works, but he was upping the ante on the “P” of P&D. (Ratcliff: “Of course, there are patterns, and there are patterns.”) Robbin’s new intentions were not to confuse, per se–– although there is a skepticism of systems in all his work, a subject to which I’ll return. Rather, he was goading the viewer into seeing more, seeing multiply. Robbin compares these paintings to fugues whose dense chords contain a weave of melodic symmetries; listeners can learn to hear the independent voices. Taking this approach to impressive paintings such as 1979-8 or 1979-20, one can begin to understand what the artist was after. Imposing in scale (70”x120” and 72”x166” respectively), the faceted crystal logic of these works suggests the reverberations of a pipe organ in a cathedral. But Messiaen or Boulez, perhaps, rather than Bach; pattern is not so much fugal as fugitive. As Robbin had written of Held’s paintings, his own works were increasingly “exercises in omni-attentiveness” that captivate and disorient in equal measure.

It was in 1980 that Robbin broke through to the fourth dimension. More than a century of geometers, artists and spiritualists (Steiner and Ouspensky, for example, who seized on the fourth dimension as a portal to higher being) had strained to see it for themselves. For all of them, the animation of a hypercube in various rotations by Banchoff and Strauss, made on a supercomputer of the day, would have been a holy grail. And so it was to Robbin, who studied it until he could see the rubbery distortions and weird inversions of the spinning hypercube as 3-D projections, or shadows, of a rigid, unchanging figure passing through a dimension we only infer–– just as anyone would take for granted the solidity of a rotating cube from its distorting 2-D shadow (or for that matter, the full volume of the world from the flat projections on our eyeballs.) One of Oliver Sacks’s last books, The Mind’s Eye, includes a chapter about some extraordinary powers of visualization among the blind. Sightless topologist Bernard Morin solved, with his inner vision, the problem of turning a sphere inside out. Reports Dr. Sacks: he quite literally saw it. Inner or outer visualization, it’s the same neurons. Like Morin (if not, perhaps, to the same extent), Robbin had succeeded in rewiring his mental map, and he was determined to bring that map to bear on the propositions of Pattern Painting.

A square can spin on a point, a cube on a line, and a hypercube… on a plane, as would be obvious if you could see four-dimensionally. As Robbin explained in his 1992 book Fourfield, “to the person accustomed only to observation in three dimensions the properties of planar rotation are mysterious, even paradoxical (shapes appear and disappear, turn inside out, flex and reverse); but these paradoxes become the very means by which we see the fourth dimension.”

For the painting Fourfield, Robbin’s 27-foot long magnum opus of 1980-81, the artist welded steel rods projecting from the surface to simulate the paradoxes of planar rotation. Here is Robbin’s description of his ingenious hybrid technique, from an essay (written 30 years later) entitled 4-D and I:

I went to a lot of trouble to make sure that the painted lines and the painted metal rods look the same to a standing viewer. But as the viewer moves, strange things happen. As in any relief, planes can be hidden behind an edge of that plane (seen exactly edge first), and in my four-dimensional works, one has the sensation that whole three-dimensional structures are hidden behind open cubes. Space spins out of space as the viewer moves.

How much math does one need to know to appreciate Robbin’s paintings? By watching Banchoff and Strauss’s film and others now widely available on the internet, I have become somewhat conversant with the hypercube’s gemlike symmetries, which appear when axes align, and with its inversions and flexions as it rotates across a hidden plane. Sometimes I can recognize these familiar landmarks in Robbin’s works, like red rhomboidal capes waved by matadors. I haven’t, so far, experienced the full higher-dimensional consciousness that Robbin wants to impart, but the fascinating manner in which space spins out of space in Fourfield is something new in the history of painting and sculpture.

In color, rhythm and hybrid technique, Lobofour (1982, 96” x144” x 24”) seems similar to Fourfield at first glance; but it is less regular, non-orthographic, subtly wilder. According to one of Robbin’s collaborators, mathematician George Francis, in Lobofour, “the four-dimensional lattice is no longer constrained to flat Euclidean geometry.” (The painting’s title acknowledges Nikolai Lobachevsky, the Russian pioneer of curved space.) The complications of this geometry are beyond my intuition, but clearly some higher order lies behind the painting’s darting spatiality, constantly in motion like sparkles of reflection on a lake. If you look for space in Robbin’s work, you will find it endlessly.

For Primary Structures artists and the conceptual artists of the 1960s, geometry meant the eternal (if slippery) truths of simple grids, boxes, and counting numbers. For Robbin, the uses of geometry are open-ended and dynamic–– in a word, baroque. Not long after Fourfield and Lobofour, Robbin stopped painting for almost a decade, focusing his efforts on sculpture and research, but when he began painting again in the mid-1990s, this open-endedness became more and more pronounced.

First, however, Robbin committed himself to the implications of the steel rods, making wall sculptures that added curving, wiggly forms and rhomboids of tinted plexiglass to the projecting geometry.  Like Man Ray’s rope dancer, these reliefs accompany themselves with their shadow. When lit by red and blue bulbs, the colors combine into near white except where the metal rods cast pairs of diverging shadows on the wall, one blue, one red, encoding the spatial relations of lights, sculpture and wall. For a viewer wearing 3-D red-blue glasses, the parallax of these shadow lines integrates into a stereoscopic image. Geometry now seems to project into the wall, while the actual projections–– the translucent panels, along with their skewed, tinted shadows, and the metal rods–– hover ambiguously in space. As with Fourfield and Lobofour, movement by the viewer allows for an experience of four-dimensional unfolding, while the interplay of dimensions–– one, two, three, and four; real, simulated and virtual–– glues together and flies apart.

As Robbin’s ambitions for sculpture grew, so did his grasp of cutting-edge research by Roger Penrose and others about irregular space-packing patterns, or quasicrystals. Robbin saw in quasicrystals a way to produce an infinitude of deep, fractal-like patterns–– patterns that exhibit simultaneous 2-fold, 3-fold, and 5-fold symmetry and yet, paradoxically, never repeat. Even better, quasicrystals turn out to be shadows of more regular figures from higher dimensions. How Platonic can you get?

Robbin’s involvement with quasicrystals climaxed with a permanent installation at a technical university in Copenhagen, where Robbin made an assemblage of rods and colored plates to hang from the roof of a three-story atrium. It was precisely engineered to unfold its layers of symmetry with viewers’ movements and to project animating quasicrystalline colors as the sun arcs low through the northern sky. COAST, installed in 1994 with great success, was summarily destroyed in 2003 by a new administration. With mathematician Francis’s help, however, Robbin has made a 3-D digital version of a quasicrystal, full-scale and interactive–– an aptly innovative memorial that compensates, somewhat, for bureaucratic vandalism.

In 1995, after the complex logistics of COAST, Robbin returned to painting, but this time with an eye to the native virtuality of the medium, its built-in dimensional depths. Where his paintings and hybrids, impressive as they were, had tended toward dryness and a certain claustrophobia–– with improvisation concealed afterward or restricted to the cranium–– now Robbin applied himself fully to the flat, unshadowed picture plane, allowing for improvisation to flow from head to hand; and from stencils, tape and airbrush to viscous, semi-translucent colored pigment, at first acrylic and later oils.

Robbin’s geometric paintings between 1974 and 1982 had already seen an evolution toward asymmetry and richly colored backgrounds. The carefully airbrushed minor key blues and oranges of Lobofour, at the end of that progression, seem nevertheless to remain primarily functional, a means of establishing color-coded rules to be embroidered upon by the frontal lines, actual and painted. The saturated pigments of Sol Lewitt’s cleanly abutted illusions of solid geometry (wall drawings begun in the mid-1980s) have, perhaps, a similar informational edge; the more sensuous, the more stand-offish. But by 1999, Robbin’s newly painterly approach had turned the tables on color. In comparison to Lobofour (1982), 1999-4’s chromatic power is tremendously increased, yet the palette has hardly changed. There are additional foreground elements in the more recent painting–– delicate strings of regular polyhedra that dance in space–– but the principle difference is that the background is no longer tessellated, tiled and airtight. Instead, it is thickly gaseous and luminous, with soft, intense spots of color that give off heat as well as light. The painting is impenetrable with colliding incidents and riddles of structure, yet it’s light on its feet, porous: a muted rainbow that fractures into foreground shards plays a dark scherzo all the way back to the farthest cloud of matter. In 1999-4, in a way that is new to Robbin’s paintings, color and space are intertwined–– relativistic, one could say; entangled.

Robbin’s new painterliness has continued to develop alongside mathematical speculations that are by now so far beyond the grasp of most viewers that plain looking is surely what is being called for. Which is not to say Robbin has given up explaining–– as in this technical notation in a peer-reviewed math journal about a computer study of a “a quasicrystal lattice in 5-fold orientation where the acute angles are 72° and 36°; it is a slice through a quasicrystal cloud that was made with the deBruijn algorithm.” There are grids and there are grids.

Later in this article, Robbin explains his artistic method and purpose. For the math-challenged, we may take comfort in Robbin’s assertion here, addressing math-savvy readers, that “Sorting out all these complications is not the point. My paintings are not equations, and it is not possible to read a mathematical resolution in them.” He continues:

Rather they revel in the richness and paradox of higher-dimensional visual phenomena. With a knowing nod to the mathematical possibilities, the paintings encourage an acceptance of such spatial complexity. Further, they encourage a taste for, and even a giddy joy, in spatial complexity.

2006 began a period of tragedy, misfortune and serious illness for Robbin and his family. Giddiness departed; spatial complexity stuck around. Robbin revived the idea of monochrome backgrounds to highlight phosphorescent imagery that recalls the pulsating cathode rays of early hypercube animations. The dark background in 2007-8 (2007 56”x70”), for example, recedes behind polygonal planes nested in blue, green, and orange matrices, a slashing, compressing framework. Unlike the monochromes of the 1970s, where geometry is inscribed on top, here the translucent lines embed themselves into the paint; brushy and stained, the background opens up into inscrutable space and color, a cosmic cave.

Robbin’s backgrounds didn’t stay dark for long, blossoming, for example, into the lustrous reds of 2008-1, the molten golds of 2008-O-6, and the fierce ceruleans of 2010-O-3. These insistent colors are worked and worried into unapologetic expressionism. On the other hand, 2009-7, with its palette of pale pinks and oranges, powdery yellows and blues, and with its feathery precision and buoyancy, is distinctly Impressionist in feeling. One might take it for an homage to Monet–– a unique one, which acknowledges Monet the scientist as much as Monet the painter. In Fourfield, Robbin had written about Monet quitting Paris for “the scientific study of light on haystacks and facades at different times of day and in different atmospheric conditions.” Later in the book, Robbin hypothesized Monet’s water lilies–– in which surface, sub-surface, and reflection are mingled–– as the completion of Cubism: “From this point of view […] it is the spatial properties, not the color and brushwork, that make Monet’s later work so appealing and enduring.” Those words were written in 1992. Robbin’s spatial point of view began to give ground to color and brushwork when he resumed painting a few years later, and with the Monet-like 2009-7, the two viewpoints achieve a kind of stereo integration.

Color and brushwork continue to be on the upswing. Since 2013 or so, Robbin has dispersed his dense, braided matrices more and more, leaving dimensional ghosts in shimmering fields of color and light. In 2013-6, the orange background subtly dominates, like the tarnished gold leaf of a Buddhist screen of fluttering Fall leaves. It has a richly melancholy feel. 2016-4 brings foreground and background into raw, scribbling equilibrium, achieving an almost psychotic gorgeousness reminiscent of Ensor or Nolde. 2019-1 is translucent and provisional, grays floating upon but not quite hiding deeper hues, and above that, light-struck facets like fragments of box kites in vapor.

This viewer has already confessed to being unable to see the higher dimensional spaces where Robbin’s work is embodied, but his most recent Pattern Paintings–– which one could say are less late-Monet than late-Cézanne–– provide guided-tours to the edge of the spatial horizon more expert, and every bit as lyrical, indeed as musical, as any offered before. Robbin wants us to see (as he put it in 2006 to the mathematicians) “all of the spaces in the same space at the same time.” He is speaking the language of Masaccio and Leonardo; of Picasso and Duchamp; of Al Held and Robert Smithson.

Smithson, of course, invoked four-dimensional paradox in his writings and artworks, notably the mirror displacements–– part of a general revival of interest in the spatial fourth dimension in the 1960s. In 1969, Robbin wrote about Smithson for Art News, before Robbin’s own 4-d obsession had taken hold. In that article, his focus was on Smithson’s dismantling of systems, including those of art. “I want to de-mythify things,” says Smithson in an interview which precedes the article proper.

Robbin: “People will be frustrated in their desire for certainty, but maybe they will get something more after the frustration passes.”

Smithson: “Well, it’s a problem all around, and I don’t think we will work our way out of it.”

In the text that follows, Robbin places Smithson in the company of Cage more than Judd, identifying his arrangements of materials as “reconstructions of thought processes” rather than sculptures, per se. He recognizes the originality and power of Smithson’s critique of systems. Yet Robbin doesn’t quite accept the bedeviled state of affairs that Smithson delights in exposing:

Since our perceptions mold us, we ought to be responsible for them. How they mold us, how we can be responsible for them, how we can change what we see … are only implicit in Smithson’s work. For further explorations we must wait for other artists or for other shows by Smithson.

Quite a prediction. The next year, 1970, Spiral Jetty crystallized, figuratively and literally, Smithson’s message about the open-ended nature of mathematics, of systems; in doing so, this celebrated work epitomized the “something more” that Robbin proposed beyond the horizon of certainty.

Robbin continues to believe we ought to be responsible for the way we see, but the extraordinary flowering of his paintings of the last two decades has made it easy on the eyes to do so. Built upon a gamut of restlessly shifting higher-dimensional grids–– not only quasicrystals, but braided lattices, four-dimensional knot diagrams, hyperplanes, and so on–– Robbin’s painterly improvisations constitute their own kind of systemless sytem, an open-ended spiral at whose tip all spaces coalesce. “Something more” is there for the seeing.

The post In Einstein’s Cave: Tony Robbin, An Appreciation appeared first on artcritical.

Talking to an artist at an opening reception in Chelsea recently, I mentioned I was writing a short piece on the painter Paul Jenkins, on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of his death. That a priest would write about an artist, and a non-religious artist at that, caused my bewildered interlocutor —half-ingenuously, half-ironically— to wonder: “Was he part of your fold?” Not only was he not “part of my fold” (nor, I think, of any fold for that matter) but I regret to say that I never met Paul Jenkins, because if his paintings reflect who he was, as I am sure they do, I am sure he and I would have gotten along pretty well. Neither atheist nor agnostic, Paul Jenkins was a seeker.

My first encounter with the work of Paul Jenkins was at Robert Miller Gallery on a cold Thursday night in the fall of 2014. Titled Thresholds of Color, the show included about 25 works from the 1960s through the early 2000s. I was immediately struck by the vitality of the paintings. I remember in particular the large, horizontal canvas Phenomena Timbuktu, whose organic shape seemed to have grown naturally out of some inner life principle. Standing in the gallery, I felt surrounded by the colors, smells and whispers of a mysterious garden.

Walking through the gallery, my attention was soon monopolized by a smaller room to the right, designed specifically to welcome an installation entitled Chapel of Meditation. As I would learn, this was the very first time Paul’s “chapel” was on view in its entirety. I walked in. In front of me stood a large (108 x 144 inches) and awe-inspiring canvas, Phenomena Himalayan. I can only try to describe it as a vast mineral cathedral swept over by the powerful tide of an endless river. To the right and to the left, on separate walls, were two grisaille paintings, Phenomena Chapel White, a diptych, and Phenomena Chapel Shell Sound. Vertical and still, they stood like angels keeping watch. On the fourth wall was Phenomena Entrance Portal, a title that could refer to the East Portal of the Chartres Cathedral in France, stonework he admired greatly, writing in his monograph, Anatomy of a Cloud, “The whole structure seemed to have compassion on the viewer.” In this diptych, the light-filled panel on the left seems to breathe a milky balm into a red hearth on the right. Or is it the other way around? Is the “sacred hearth” to the right breathing out its spirit into the immaculate expanse to its left? As I walked out of the gallery and down the chilly Chelsea street, I was firmly resolved to do more research about the author of such admirable work.

Actually, I did not have much time to research about the artist, since Paul himself (so to speak) came to me, in the person of his wife, Suzanne Jenkins. She was told that a priest had lingered meditatively in the chapel, and a mutual friend soon arranged our meeting. We first met at the gallery, pulling two chairs together in the chapel room, between ‘Himalayan’ and ‘Portal’. We then met a second time at Paul’s studio in the East Village, and then again at Japonica, his favorite Japanese restaurant. Little by little, I got to know more about this man who had the nobility of a Russian prince and the discipline of a Japanese calligrapher.

Born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, Paul Jenkins’ interest in art was, from the outset, imbued with a spiritual sense. During the time he lived in Kansas City, he would pay constant visits to the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art (then the William Rockhill Nelson Art Gallery) which includes one of the finest collections of Eastern art in the world. There, he would admire the sculptures of Kuan Yin, the goddess of mercy, Shiva and Kali. Their mystical poses —sometimes languorous, sometimes terrifying— were compelling and as the artist described it, fostered in him “a sense of mystery about the universe” that has drawn him all his life. (1) His great-uncle Burris Jenkins, the outspoken protestant pastor of the First Community Church in Kansas City, Missouri, was among the first to notice his “vocation” —and even nourished hopes that Paul would one day follow in his footsteps! Paul had a vocation, yes, and was driven towards the mystery, yet the path opening before him was art, not the ministry, as he clearly manifested it in a letter written in 1945 (when he was 22): “It suddenly became clear to me what kept those few great artists at their constant drive in creating. It was the realization of humility to the greater source. Whether to them as individuals the source was God, instinctive faith in an abstract divine force, or a God heathen in manner, they were the vessel. How easily we lead astray our egos and if you and I are not kept nourished we will harden into breakable glass. Better we are supple children and never all knowing… We’ll thrive on the mystery!”(2)

That Paul Jenkins was a man on a quest for the “greater source” of life is not a poetic fantasy of this writer nor do we rely solely for this on one epistolary confession made in a moment of youthful exaltation. This is documented by his work: each painting can be read like a distinct diary entry on a lifelong pilgrimage. From 1960 on, Paul Jenkins titled his paintings “Phenomena”, alluding to Goethe’s Theory of Color as well as to Immanuel Kant’s understanding that the object perceived is but the incomplete manifestation of a mysterious essence. Yet nothing is more foreign to Paul Jenkins than the German philosopher’s dualism. In that regard, the artist is a lot closer the Eastern non-dualistic mindset. Speaking of which, I soon discovered that Paul and I had something else in common: our love for Japan. From his early interest in ceramics, to Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s classes at the Art Students League in the late 1940s and early ‘50s, to his enduring friendship and numerous collaborations with Yoshihara Jirō and the members of Gutai, Japan was key to Paul’s artistic formation. I was not surprised, therefore, to find in his work a certain quality that is particularly developed among Japanese artists and craftsmen: an appreciation of nature that is not exterior, but rather interior. Rooted in contemplation, the artist reproduced within himself, through patient and humble practice, the inner workings of nature leading to the slow and organic birth of form.

Phenomena Timbuktu is a good example of this. When I first saw it at Robert Miller Gallery, I was struck by its enigma. What I saw had movement and stillness, gravity and growth, accident and control, matter and spirit. Only life itself can hold together such contradictory forces within the simplicity of a form, without dissolving into chaos. As I took my time to allow the painting to articulate its paradoxical existence, it invited me to travel back in time, from the flower to the bud, and from the bud to the seed; from the visible phenomena of form, movement and simplicity, to the invisible, the inner principle of life, the “greater source” of being. Goethe, whom Paul Jenkins read extensively, said that it is as hard to read a great book as to write one. In a similar vein, we can state that we cannot understand a painting unless we are ready to partake in the deeper questions that moved its author.

Religious art as such has grown scarce in the past two hundred years, and while contemporary art sometimes claims to be “spiritual,” it is often so in a way that is vague and formless. Paul Jenkins, as much as I understand him, was not trying to make “spiritual paintings”: he was concerned with light, color, form, movement. Transcendence called out to him from within, not unlike his words about watercolor: “like a bell tolling deeply in the sea from some strange sunken chapel”, as he wrote in a 1983 letter. (3) If the faint vibration of this bell can be heard in many of his works, the Chapel of Meditation is a resonance chamber where it echoes with particular intensity. I don’t know whether it comes from the mystical heights of ‘Himalayan’, or from the secret chamber of the hearth of the ‘Portal’ on the opposite wall. What I know for sure is that it echoes from one wall to the other, under the benevolent eyes of the white, standing forms. The viewer, walking through, is carried away by the music.

(1). Anatomy of a Cloud. Paul Jenkins with Suzanne Donnelly Jenkins. Harry N. Abrams, Inc.: New York, 1983, p. 40.
(2). Exhibition catalogue, Paul Jenkins A Tribute. The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio, 2015, p. 65.
(3). Ibid. p. 46.

The post “Like A Bell Tolling Deeply In The Sea”: Fr. Paul Anel on the Paintings of Paul Jenkins appeared first on artcritical.

Few artists make work that both looks good and manages to make the world a better place, but Aubrey Roemer is one such artist. Her artistic career spans oceans and continents, from a strip club in Brooklyn to the sugarcane fields of Nicaragua, and from the islands of eastern Indonesia to the migrant camps of Greece. Everywhere she goes, she uses painting as a way to make genuine connections with people and foster awareness of social and environmental issues both locally and globally.

I first became acquainted with Roemer’s work in the spring of 2014 when she had just moved to Montauk to work on her “Leviathan” series, in which she attempted to paint 10 percent of the town population in the course of a summer. Painted in blue on domestic fabrics donated by the local community, the portraits were installed on the beach where they were free to flutter in the wind, their blue and white forms flickering between sea and sky. I’ve been consistently impressed since then by the way she builds rapport with her subjects and then installs her work with an aim of serving the community that inspired it. Her story illustrates how an artist can change the world, one painting at a time.

Though she’s been painting her whole life, Roemer’s practice of community engagement began in 2013 with the “Demimonde” exhibition at Pumps strip club in Brooklyn. She was invited by Pumps’ pinups director Laura McCarthy to do a solo show of paintings at the club, and the show was such a success that Roemer went on to curate three more exhibitions/burlesque nights there. The shows featured Roemer’s paintings of the dancers alongside work by Brooklyn-based artists such as the painter Jesse McCloskey, who has kept a studio around the corner from Pumps for the past 10 years. Roemer fostered collaboration between two communities that had hitherto coexisted side by side without interacting very much, and perhaps both groups discovered that they had more in common than they might have thought.

Hopping from residency to residency since then, her adventures have become increasingly fantastic and inspirational. With support from World Connect, Roemer traveled to Nicaragua in 2015 to do a project with La Isla Foundation, a non-governmental organization that fights the under-publicized epidemic of chronic kidney disease from unknown causes (CKDu), which is ravaging Central America and other equatorial regions around the globe. It is especially prevalent among agricultural laborers worked to death in hot climates—their kidneys fail, from overwork in extreme heat and possibly also as a result of the chemicals used in industrial monoculture. Because sugarcane is a major revenue stream for the national economy, La Isla Foundation gets far more pushback than support from the Nicaraguan government on the matter.

Roemer spent one month living in the Chichigalpa region, where she watched trucks full of sugarcane rumble past while painting portraits of deceased workers on discarded sugarcane sacks. She also painted protest banners, which have since been used by a local grassroots movement agitating for research on CKDu and compensation. As tensions heightened between La Isla Foundation and the government, she had to leave before the project was complete. Just last month Roemer returned to Nicaragua and displayed the completed works in the ruins of an abandoned church, and then gifted them to the community.

Her next project took her to Indonesia, where she set sail from the island of Lombok with a motley crew of artists on board a traditional wooden phinisi sailboat to explore the culture of the remote eastern islands. During this time Roemer completed another project, titled Maccini Sombala (“Seeing Sails”), in which she traced the hands of the people she met on the islands and printed them directly onto the sails of the boat. She used a range of greens that both reflected the lush environment of the islands and tipped a hat to the Islamic culture of Indonesia. This spring, Roemer will curate the next residency aboard the boat, called the Al Isra, proceeds from which will go towards the installation of a solar-powered trash collection wheel at the mouth of the nearby Mataram River, which it’s estimated will stop 10 tons of plastic from entering the Indian Ocean every day.

After returning to Long Island for the summer, Roemer and her boyfriend traveled to Greece to see how they could be of service to the flood of migrants washing up on the islands. Roemer embedded herself in a refugee shelter for migrant boys on the island of Lesvos. Titling the work Khamsa, she created 99 prayer flags using reclaimed fabric from deconstructed life preservers and emergency blankets. The “Khamsa” is a North African talisman of a hand with an eye in its palm, so she traced the hands of 66 women who she met there, and then added images of the women’s eyes to complete the works. The khamsas were also accompanied by 33 prayer flags upon which male migrants were invited to write prayers and protests. The number 99 was chosen to represent the number of beads on an Islamic prayer necklace, and the ratio of men to women was intended to counter the media narrative that portrays the migrant crisis as consisting primarily of men.

After traveling to China to exhibit Khamsa at 203 Gallery in Shanghai, Roemer followed the work back to Greece where it was installed at Athens’ IFAC Gallery, which gave Roemer an opportunity to show Yasamin, a girl she had met in a refugee camp and who had become her assistant for the project, their work installed in a professional setting (though only through Whatsapp, as Yasamin was still held in immigration custody on Lesvos). Reflecting on the project over Skype, Roemer told me “The most important form of contemporary art I could make, the most compelling thing I could possibly do, was to be standing by this young girl’s side and making art with her. It actually didn’t matter what it was at all, just the fact that I was standing next to her.” Proceeds from sales of the work go to Greek NGO Desmos, which is active on the frontlines of the refugee crisis.

In his 2006 book of collected essays, Another Future: Poetry and Art in a Postmodern Twilight, the poet and critic Alan Gilbert suggests that art can serve as a means of “imaginative resistance” to the systemic problems that plague our world, through “tactics imaginatively employed on a daily, local, and global basis (with the knowledge that when the effects of globalization reside everywhere, local activities have global ramifications and vice versa).” This is what Aubrey Roemer is doing with her painting practice, through which she not only publicizes relevant issues affecting marginalized communities, but also directly empowers and uplifts the members of those communities with whom she works. This is contemporary art at its finest.

The post Aubrey Roemer: Helping the World, Painting by Painting appeared first on artcritical.

Landing at Gerald R. Ford International Airport, in Grand Rapids MI, you’ll be hard-pressed to pick anything that distinguishes it from other mid-sized cities almost anywhere along the Rust Belt. The drive-thru airport paired with the generic flatness of its highways, lined with roadside motels, strip malls, and chain restaurants, evoke an obligatory trip home to see the family for the holidays or a funeral, not a singular cultural event. For two and a half weeks every September, this Western Michigan city of fewer than 200,000 people swells at least twice, maybe three times over with guests, mainly from a 300-mile radius, who are there to attend and participate in ArtPrize, an annual arts festival and competition now in its eighth year. It is a fascinating anomaly because it is neither art fair nor biennial. It would perhaps also go wholly unnoticed beyond local news outlets were it not promoting the largest single cash award, worldwide, given exclusively to artists. Only the Dorothy and Lilian Gish Prize ($300,000) and the MacArthur Fellowship are larger ($625,000 over a five-year period), but they nominate and award many eligible creative and technical fields beyond visual artists.

Launched in 2009, ArtPrize was founded by Rick DeVos, the 34-year-old scion of the ultra-conservative DeVos clan, the Alticor/Amway founding family, whose name dots several buildings in downtown Grand Rapids. Some critics are uncomfortable that the founding sponsor of the prize, the Dick & Betsy DeVos Family Foundation, has vigorously supported charter schools, free market think tanks like the Cato Institute, as well as anti-union, pro-Christian, anti-gay, and anti-same-sex marriage initiatives. To overlook the positive impact of ArtPrize while speculating on a sinister, ulterior motive ascribed to the younger DeVos’s efforts, however, leads to its own closed-minded approach. In the art world, neither the conservatism of an Emirati or Qatari sheikh(a), nor the questionable ethics of any Russian oligarch get so closely examined, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art certainly didn’t refuse any of that Koch money. Without any evidence of wrongdoing, or becoming an apologist for their political activism, let’s sidestep this area of scrutiny. It’s a philosophy of taking the bad with the good that will come to feel pervasive there.

For its efforts, the city receives an enviable amount of cultural tourism that, according to the Anderson Economic Group, a Michigan and Illinois-based consulting firm, resulted in an estimated $22.2 million in economic impact in 2013. Yet, this is not a typical art-going or art-buying public either selecting the work, volunteering, or attending the event. Rapidians see themselves as part of a cultural dialog marked, for better or worse, by the 1969 installation of Alexander Calder’s La Grande Vitesse in front of their city hall through the efforts of one indefatigable citizen, one of the first National Endowment for the Arts public art grants, and the help of then-Congressman Gerald R. Ford. Their civic pride led to the three-day Festival Grand Rapids in 1970 as a celebration of the landmark. ArtPrize has outdone, if not supplanted the Festival, along with other smaller art events, but it “wouldn’t work in another town without that volunteer spirit,” according to William Lamson, a New York artist participating in this year’s competition for the first time.

Since the inaugural edition, award figures have evolved into two parallel and eye-watering Grand Prizes of $200,000. One is selected by an invited three-person jury of experts that relies on the 20-project shortlist created by jurors of four subcategories: Two-dimensional, Three-dimensional, Installation, and Time-based art. The other award is determined by a public voting system, which began with the prize’s founding and which bills itself as “radically open.” Anyone 13 and over (lowered from 16 this year) can register to vote for their top choices in the four categories, either online or through an official app. Often referred to derisively, or at best quizzically, as the “American Idol of art,” ArtPrize engages the art world intelligentsia only minimally, in order to filter its presentation. It is primarily located within a three-square-mile perimeter downtown, where this year, 170 venues — as varied as City Hall, hotels, police stations, churches, banks, hospitals, restaurants, and cafes — have paired themselves with the 1,453 artists who submitted work in the lead up to the event. As an artist, the only eligibility requirements are that you must be at least 18 years old, and pay the $50 fee to enter, so there’s plenty of bad art to go around. This means that the populist and the professional sit uncomfortably side-by-side, with Grand Rapids-based artist Mandy Cano Villalobos noting, via email, that, “It’s like two separate ArtPrizes running concurrently.” It could easily devolve into an arts and crafts festival, if the local museums and college galleries weren’t also participating. The increased attendance must be welcome for them, but at the same time, a multitude of people trudging single-file through the Grand Rapids Art Museum, and elsewhere, made it difficult for a viewer to appreciate the better exhibitions. For example, three large-scale tapestries by Kiki Smith occupying a space near the second floor exit were impossible to reach and look at closely without battling against the flow of traffic. Dario Robleto’s work, Survival Does Not Lie in the Heavens, shortlisted by Tina Rivers Ryan in the Two-Dimensional category, is a work already so subdued that it felt stifled by the crowd amassed to watch the popular video around the corner, Higher Ground by Hillerbrand+Magsamen, which made it to the public’s Final 20 in the Time-based category. At another venue, the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, Eric Dickson’s interactive sound piece, Wars and Rumors of Wars, shortlisted by Deana Haggag, hanging overhead in the gift shop, is missed easily amidst the quickly exiting throngs.

Although the voting process is open, only 10-15% of each year’s almost half-million visitors are engaged enough to decide the outcome, meaning an average of 42,000 registered voters lodge the entirety of the approximately 400,000 votes per year. This year, 37,433 visitors submitted the 380,119 votes (or 9.8%). It’s remarkable that Ditch Lily Drawing by Grand Rapids-based artist and composer Nathan Lareau at Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park even made it onto the public’s Final 20. The rhythmic, fragile wall drawing, all twigs and intersecting shadows, communicates a common-sense, yet elegant lesson that the hidden beauty of the overlooked can be unlocked by the right hands. Located at the venue furthest from downtown, though, it was likely at a disadvantage in trying to garner the return visitors and votes to go further. It doesn’t exactly overturn the idea that a minority of people decides for the rest what is good art. In the past, the Public Vote has favored works with some combination of landscape, spectacle, virtuosity, and self-affirmation, rewarding artists who, if they weren’t outright pandering, were definitely easy to digest. Sweeping categories of ideas that have been awarded over the years include the Lake, the Forest, the Sea, Elephants, and Religion, which all seem to imply a collective desire to probe an expanse, but also indicate a concrete literalism, a failure to abstract, and a lack of nuance. It’s a reminder that when the temporary art carnival leaves town, there should be long-term efforts to engage and educate a greater portion of the public. Meijer Gardens, which is open to the public year-round (save three holidays), is a great site for that. With around 75 sculptures on display from a world-class collection of 200, it’s one of the things that truly sets Grand Rapids apart from all of those other midsized cities. The other is ArtPrize, and it’s clear that it gets all of the attention.

As an organization, ArtPrize still is evolving from its original free-for-all style, with Kevin Buist, Director of Exhibitions, working more directly in the development of new programming. These initiatives include the second year of the Fellowship for Emerging Curators, the first year of Featured Public Projects, and the third year of Seed Grants for artists, the latter two projects underwritten in part or entirely by the Frey Foundation, whose Chairman, David Frey, said in a speech that the jury “provides balance that the public program needs.” Cano Villalobos added that over the last eight years, ArtPrize has “beefed up their programming, providing funds for curatorial projects and artists, educational activities, lectures and panel discussions, renowned jurors, [which] I think that has greatly helped [it] gain credibility with the Grand Rapids art community, and effectively engage the non-art community.” As ArtPrize moves closer to its 10^th anniversary, the organizers should be unafraid of these incremental changes, which have had an immediate impact. Notably, the four curatorial projects supported by ArtPrize this year garnered five nominations on the jurors’ shortlist, and one of them, This Space is not Abandoned by the Cultura Collective at 912 Grandville Avenue, led by Steffanie Rosalez, went on to win the Installation Juried Award and half of the Outstanding Venue Award. The other Juried Awards, each worth $12,500, were announced the evening of October 7 and include Isaac Aoki’s les bêtes (Two-Dimensional), the only locally based artist, an amateur photographer and also ballet dancer at the Grand Rapids Ballet; William Lamson’s Excavations (Three-Dimensional); and Eric Souther’s Search Engine Vision “ISIS” (Time-based). The Public Vote awards went to Pettit Smith’s The Butterfly Effect (Installation); Joao Paulo Goncalves’s Portraits of Light and Shadow (Two-Dimensional); James Mellick’s Wounded Warrior Dogs (Three-Dimensional); and designer Maarten Baas’s Sweeper’s Clock (Time-based), the only piece to feature on both lists of finalists.

The first time the Grand Prizes reached parity, in 2014, the result surprised in that the Juried and Public Vote reflected an enlightened alignment of opinion about Intersections (2013) by Pakistani-American artist Anila Quayyum Agha. In 2015, the jurors opted for the performative work of Kate Gilmore, and the public chose a photorealistic quilt by a group that included a previous Grand Prize winner — a stark divergence in medium and content. This year, another performance work and craftwork were chosen, but perhaps there’s a convergence of sorts to be found. The three jurors — Michelle Grabner, artist and professor at School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Paul Ha, Director at the MIT List Visual Arts Center; and Eric Shiner, Senior Vice President at Sotheby’s — selected North Carolina artist Stacey Kirby’s Bureau of Personal Belonging, three participatory performances grouped in an installation made to look like a “60’s era bureaucratic office space.” It asked viewers to validate their gender and sexual identity, challenging laws and lawmakers that would fix those definitions. The Public Vote chose Ohio craftsman James Mellick’s Wounded Warrior Dogs, a series of seven wooden dog sculptures that exhibit the kinds of injuries soldiers return home with from war, which asks for consideration and support for veterans. You could say both projects are working with identity, aiming to raise awareness of urgent issues. Both go further and address the politics of bodies, pointing to the government’s failure to act or its willingness to overreact. Above all, they each engage in their own kind of political activism, which typically wouldn’t fall on the same side of the political spectrum. Yet somehow, they found a place and platform from which to explore them, and it seems that only at ArtPrize could they exist, however comfortably, side-by-side.

The post The People Speak: A Report from the 2016 ArtPrize appeared first on artcritical.

The paintings of Jonathan Lyndon Chase display an overwhelming elasticity to them. Bodies are readily stretched, twisted and contorted to fit into spaces that remain unnameable but still very much present. In an untitled work from 2014, the space and depth of the painting references a fecal pile in the way the paint is stacked and sits on the surface with a kind of clumsy audacity. Visceral grit, orchestrated by a network of collaged material, weaves its way into more traditional painting language. But even the collage is sometimes abrupt, with intruding shards of aluminum foil, stitched yarn and foam, constantly causing the paintings to throb and pulse in and out of resolution.  Elegance is replaced with subtlety of intrusion and the tenderness of seamless collision. His figures are painted with skins that seem vividly translucent, allowing us to gaze through the stratified layers of paint. Their luminescence seems both coy and purposeful, often serving as the only rational light source.

Chase manages to excise gender performances from his paintings almost entirely. Instead, we are left with the residue of toxic masculinity, repurposed and repositioned in a manner that allows us to probe and question their function and meaning. Chase tends to leave his paintings absent of nameable places, with the exception of a few paintings – such as Man in Tub (2015) in which a figure’s limbs and body are recombined like Tetris pieces to fit snug into a placid bathtub, for instance, or another in which two figures are reclined in intimate repose in what appears to be a bed. In this intentional defamiliarization of space, he begins to deflate the omnipresence of normative social structures that forcefully define how and where conventionally masculine and feminine bodies are supposed to function. In this way, he prevents us from hijacking the agency of these figures forcing us to read their bodies as texts.

The specter of racist and homophobic violence looms large when queer black and brown bodies deny conventional legibility and insist upon the opacity of their own historical narratives. When we don’t know what to do with young black boys and girls who don’t behave according to our violent prescriptions of manhood or femininity, we kill them. We kill them with prayer. We kill them with conversion therapy.  We kill them with oversimplification.  We relegate their complicated and contradictory humanity to the darkest corners of our imagination. We erase them. What I find most intriguing about this work is the way Chase leans into this obscurity instead of privileging clarity. This playful and at times spectacular irresolution plays a significant role in his work.  Bodies are refigured as complex ensembles, brilliantly synthesizing the facility of his line, his deft paint handling, and a color sensibility that references comics and ‘90s cartoons.  A collection of hieroglyphic hands, heads, dicks and asses with an elastic relationship to one another and to the spaces they occupy, these robust and curvaceous figures at times aggressively push the limits of the picture plane and at other times are jettisoned into the constellation of body parts strewn about the canvas, leaving us to sift through the pile to discern the dead from the living.

Trying to place the men and boys in Chase’s paintings becomes a struggle. In one painting he simultaneously captures the enormity of Superman’s “Fortress of Solitude” as well as the suffocating horror of the Well in Buffalo Bill’s basement in “The Silence of the Lambs.”  In another painting, Man with Heads (2015), we see a figure carrying a sack of severed heads.  Again, like many of the figures in Chase’s paintings, he seems to glow almost like a beacon at the center of the composition, illuminating the sheets of dark walls that confine the open space behind him.  A bit farther off in the distance we notice two cliffs on either side of the canvas, converging into a precipice.  With a firm and confrontational pose, torso twisted around and eyes focused back onto us, and with a full view of his bare behind, the figure entices viewers toward this conceptual edge of the painting, reminding us that our polite curiosity is not to be trusted.

We do not miss the clarity of representational narratives in these paintings. Instead Chase presents us with a curious proposition. What if we affirm the unconventional complexity in the bodies of black and brown queer folk? What happens to gender if we decenter masculinity and femininity and consider other modes of self–expression, displacing history to freely probe and repurpose the sources of our identity construction?  There is no rush to answer these questions here. He instead forces us to sit, wholly attentive and present with every painting. This is encouraging.

The post A Curious Proposition: The Paintings of Jonathan Lyndon Chase appeared first on artcritical.

Exhibitions considered in this review: Joyce Kozloff: Social Studies at French Institute: Alliance Française, February 25 to April 25, 2015; Joyce Kozloff: Maps + Patterns at DC Moore Gallery, March 26 to April 25; Mapping Brooklyn at BRIC, February 26 to May 3, 2015 and at the Brooklyn Historical Society, February 26 to September 6, 2015

Maps have always sought to express more than mere geographical information. In ancient Assyrian carved stones, traditional compass-based cartographic inferences sat alongside pointers to more epic, mythic realms at the very edges of the earth. In medieval mappaemundi the contorted shapes of Europe, Africa, and Asia appeared pockmarked not just with major rivers and cites but with biblical events and monstrous races. In the maps of the modern period this same terrain was re-imagined as a political geography, with emergent states and historic empires battling for prominence across documents that drew cultural borders and affirmed legal assertions to territory. Today, even, Google Maps allows us to pepper the ground beneath our feet with personalized information of our own or of our peers: routes and recommendations layered atop of streets in a manipulatable, ever-evolving cityscape.

These ideas of subjectivity and fiction make maps particularly fertile ground for those contemporary artists who, like cartographers for millennia before them, remain invested in both expressing and re-shaping the world around them. Perhaps foremost amongst them is Jocye Kozloff, whose work appears in recent exhibitions in four spaces across New York City: at DC Moore Gallery, the Alliance Française, BRIC, and the Brooklyn Historical Society.

First rising to prominence in the early 1970s as an original member of the Pattern and Decoration movement, Kozloff became known as much for her politics as her work. She advocated against the dominance of a predominantly painterly, male, and overly-conceptual art world, arguing for the patterned and the decorative – with its sense of craft, femininity, repetition, triviality, and a more colorful or traditional “beauty” — as a foil to this status quo. As Kozloff wrote in her 1976 statement, “10 Approaches to the Decorative,” (a withering rejoinder to the Minimalist “negations’l” of Ad Reinhardt et al.), work must be: “anti-pure, anti-purist, anti-puritanical, anti-minimalist, anti-post minimalist, anti-reductivist, anti-formalist, anti-pristine, anti-austere…” In place of these negations Kozloff affirmed the “subjective, romantic, imaginative, personal, autobiographical, whimsical, narrative, decorative, lyrical…”

It is not hard to see how the cartographic, with all its intricacies, subjectivities, and imagination, might become incorporated into such a project. Formally, the tessellated, patchwork blocks of pieces like Hidden Chambers (1975-76) or the more recent If I Were An Astronomer (Mediterranean) (2014) recall plan views of cityscapes or the repeated contour lines of geographical surveys; and materially too, her ceramic floor and wall mosaics, such as An Interior Decorated (1978-79) or Tile Wainscot (1979-81), evoke the sixth-century map of the Byzantine world set into the floor of the church of Saint George in Madaba, Jordan.

But more often, historical maps are deliberately knitted into her two-dimensional works, recreating and then reworking them in a number of different ways. Two of Kozloff’s contributions to Mapping Brooklyn (BRIC and BHS), Waves (2015), rework maps of the borough with her trademark patterns that serve to draw focus onto or away from particular aspects of the original cartography: swirling patchwork rivers lead the eye towards the monotone land, or streets blocked out in green washes and red tessellated stickers ping out amongst otherwise white street grids. At the Alliance Française, collaged octopi stretch their tentacles portentously over classroom maps of Europe; the didactic qualities of geographical and historical knowledge merge with a playful air of schoolchild fantasy that the contents of textbooks enjoy amongst their intended readership. Elsewhere in her work, the recent The Tempest (2014), beveled squares of traditional South Asian maps act as a backdrop for appliqué figures with a more political edge. Masculine military figurines — the sort of guys with a tendency to carve up and dominate the mapped land beneath them — abound in cut-out roundels, while counteracting these, the hemispherical domes of halved globes rise from the canvas, maternal and breast-like, their brass-embossed spinning tips transformed into pointed metallic nipples.

The political and the decorative remain intertwined in Kozloff’s work, the urgency of her social commentary never far from view. This is felt most keenly in one of her largest and most affecting works, Targets (1999-2000), a sculptural arrangement of 24 curved canvases into a nine-foot walk-in globe, the centrepiece of Mapping Brooklyn. From the outside, the cartographic sense of a constructed world could not be more apparent. A structural, wooden, rib-like shell, is held together by exposed bolts to create a definable yet insistently fictional sphere for the viewer to enter. Upon stepping through a removable segment into the shape, stooping one’s way to a sonically muffled space, one is struck first visually by the surrounding canvases: abstract (but not minimalist), the segmented and patinated blocks appeal to an aesthetic that runs throughout Kosloff’s work, bright tones and wiggly bands of contoured color creating a patchwork sense of stepped and enveloping depth. Yet upon closer inspection, the markings on the maps are not only abstract colours and more typical cartographics — city names, roads, compass points, and weather signals — but also the hatched vertical and horizontal notches of a target scope. Red pinpoints of heat seeking missiles and the coordinates of radar grids shift perception from the artistic to the militaristic: each location represented is in fact a site of major US military activity since the Second World War, their unnervingly close-cropped focus in this pre-9/11 work a prescient foreshadowing of the Drone Wars of today.

The appearance of Kozloff’s art in happy coincidence across three contemporaneous shows seems to mark a moment of reflection on a career stretching back over forty years. But if anything, the simultaneous presence of her work across the city serves to emphasize Kozloff’s consistency, and her constitution for a change in world perceptions: not just a reclaiming of the mapped geographical world, but of the art landscape too.

The post Mapping Joyce Kozloff: The Political and The Decorative Intertwined appeared first on artcritical.

It is odd that a work of art can exude an aura of assurance, indeed of meditative presence and calm, and yet constitute a problem. That it can be, oxymoronically, a carefree anxious object. And yet that is the state I have imposed on a Kazimira Rachfal, hanging — if that is the right word for a painting that is in fact propped — a few feet from my writing table. I was lent the work to have it in my possession as I write about the artist. But I neglected to take proper note of its correct orientation when I abducted it from the worktable where it was born. As yet unsigned or documented on its reverse, the piece does not offer official clues — the imprimatur of formal intention — to settle the matter.

And then I confused things further by deciding to “hang” it in such an irregular fashion. A freestanding, white-painted steel staircase that leads to the mezzanine bedroom in my apartment, hand milled in Brooklyn, is like some kind of constructivist sculpture, with a pair of heavy yet floating triangles supporting and encasing the treads. One flank, at right angles to my desk, sports vertical and horizontal strips that link outer beams to a circular aperture (its wobbly shape inspired by the cover of a book on le Corbusier). This loose grid comprises a favorite spot for intimate, object-like pictures — works on board, for instance, or canvases on stretchers almost as deep as they are wide, or pieces set in hefty frames.

The sturdy little Rachfal, as unapologetic about its means of support as is its new staircase habitat’s, lends itself to creative misplacement. It can hang true, an arbitrarily determined side flush with a vertical metal element and its opposite corner pivoting on the diagonal undercarriage. But it can also submit to the diagonal logic of the stairs and live at 45 degrees. Refusing to behave politely as a picture on the wall, the painting thus hung insists more fully on engagement with its composition. Or else it becomes a different composition, an unintended diamond-shaped painting. Or, a third option, tilting back in my office chair, I too can enter this diagonal universe, the painting and I finding ourselves in anti-gravitational intimacy.

Picasso is said to have hung a favorite Matisse in his collection at an irregular angle. This forced him, he said, to look at it afresh each time the painting caught his eye, never to allow it to sink into the furnishings. Being Picasso, some half-gentle knock to his rival/friend was also entailed. Whether Matisse or Rachfal, a subversive hang manages both to objectify and elevate. The owner is more conscious that the picture is a thing when it is hung wrong but can become blasé about the image when it is hung right.

A Matisse a kilter is different from a Rachfal askew, however, in that Matisse is more evidently representational (the Picasso anecdote refers, I think, to Matisse’s Portrait of Marguerite, 1906). But abstraction only makes the orientation of the “figure” in Rachfal more acute, if not axiomatic. My Rachfal “depicts” a blue shape on a black ground. (The way black wraps around the sides of the board further grounds image to object.) The steely gray blue is an irregular rectangle. Viewed in what I half-know to be the right way up—based on memory, knowledge of her oeuvre, and a modicum of visual intelligence—the shape’s right side bends out a little (an eighth of an inch closer to the painting’s edge at the top than the base), its crown sliced off at a bowed diagonal. It can be read as a window with a drooping blind, perhaps, while inverted, the same shape could be the blade of a guillotine.

The thing, in other words, is ambivalent about its own abstractness — whether between association and purity or within each. As a geometric shape it seems specific yet is too prone to variables to be nameable. It is involved, in Laura Hunt’s phrase, in an “imaginary mathematics.” It is elusive without being ethereal. Neither platonic nor empirical, it has the energy of describing without being descriptive and has absoluteness without fixity.

The painting is as hard to orient conceptually or stylistically as it is compositionally. Contemporary taste offers antimonies as a grid within which to place an individual artist’s aesthetic intentions. Thus, for instance, the prevailing fashion for “provisional” painting has resolution as its polar opposite. Expressive handling is at one end of a dichotomy where at the other is cool, detached treatment of a surface. Purism counters “personalism”. But Rachfal’s delectably obstinate image confounds any graph constructed from such opposites. There is a slow-cooked deliberation to the surface that is the opposite of slickness and yet is marvelously, placidly settled in its own way, quite devoid of any feeling of being tentative, unsure. Just shy of simplistic, her shape eludes heraldry or schemata. Emotionally poignant in its handcraftedness, it is nonetheless free of expressionism.

Placed on the diagonal, Rachfal’s little black square inevitably recalls the historic photograph of Malevich’s progenitor installed in his Exhibition 0,10 of 1915. Its position in the corner of a crowded salon hang was calculated, as we all know, to remind Russians of traditional domestic placement of icons. Icon painting feels pertinent to Rachfal’s potent mix of investment and detachment.

Not knowing which way to hang the work keeps the eye and mind engaged, but finding in the process that it works wonders in any direction gives it its own gravity. Many an abstract painting should wish for such a problem, to be its own sun within the universe.

The post Orientation Games: Getting the Hang of a Painting by Kazimira Rachfal appeared first on artcritical.

February 14 to March 28, 2015
528 West 26th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 315 0470

You need to know this: some parts of the Cold War are remembered, others are not. One particularly brutal episode that has been mostly forgotten is the Nicaraguan Civil War, which spanned about 30 years. During the 1980s, the US government funneled weapons and money into the hands of the Contras, an array of right wing paramilitary organizations opposing the leftist Sandinistas, who had deposed the American-installed Samoza dictatorship in 1979. The support provided to the Contras by the Reagan administration briefly blew up into a fiasco in 1986, when it was revealed that US Marine Corps Lt. Oliver North had been funding such groups via proceeds of illegal arms sales to Iran, laundering of federal money, and by protecting (or possibly aiding) the Contras’ manufacture and distribution of cocaine. The Contras systematically attacked civilians and aid workers, and used torture, assassination, terrorism, and rape to suppress leftist insurrection. The same tactics were, at that time, being taught to rightist soldiers from several Latin American countries at the US-based and government-funded School of the Americas (now the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation). The civil war was horrific, resulting in the deaths of up to 50,000 people, including a lot of civilians. But that conflict is largely eclipsed by other more optimistic events, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification of Germany, the ejection of the Soviets from Afghanistan, the Polish Solidarity movement, and Glasnost and Perestroika. Nonetheless, the Cold War’s aftereffects on several nations in the region are still festering, as seen in the immigration crisis of this past summer.

Alfredo Jaar’s exhibition, “Shadows,” now at Galerie Lelong, includes four photographs from the early stages of that war, taken in 1978 by documentarian Koen Wessing (1942-2011). The show is introduced by a short video interview with Wessing, who describes the incident shown in his pictures, which are displayed as 12-by-13-inch lightboxes with black-and-white transparencies. A campesino was executed by the Samoza regime, his body dumped by a rural road. Wessing doesn’t spare any of the violence: the man’s head wound is plainly visible in several pictures, as his neighbors collect his body. The first image one encounters is of soldiers inspecting a bus at a checkpoint, giving some sense of the violent intimidation used on the populace, which had seen inequality skyrocket and their lives abused and threatened.

The primary focus of the exhibition is the overwhelming grief shown by two young women for their father, the slain campesino. After being told of the murder, they arrive at the scene crying, clutching their heads and covering their mouths at the roadside. The lightboxes are hung in a small, darkened corridor, given several feet of space so that their impact is acute and dramatic, unfolding the narrative slowly in discrete pictures. Turning a corner in the hallway, a large room opens with an enormous installation: a photo of the daughters wailing, projected onto the wall, which is covered with an aluminum panel cut around their bodies. Slowly, the rest of the scene fades into blackness, leaving the two girls, torqued by anguish, in empty space. Then, the girls themselves fade into bright white light, backlit LEDs shining in the metal panel’s cutout. They become sharp, blazing white silhouettes in the darkness. And when the light suddenly ceases for a few moments, their afterimage is seared into the retinas until the cycle begins again.

Other photographs in the suite depict the young women at home, crying over the laid-out body of their father, his fatal injury wrapped and his corpse set on a cot. They fold themselves over to weep on the patio, while others stand, stone-faced. They mourn on the grass in front, collapsed.

Jaar’s previous work has used similar image sets to light otherwise undiscussed tragedies, and to navigate what is seen and what is not, whether by suppression or by forgetting horror. Jaar has employed documentary photographs of the Rwandan Genocide and, in a 2009 collaboration with critic and poet David Levi Strauss, substituted black boxes for photos of atrocities in the Iraq and Afghan wars that had been withheld from the public by the US government. Instead, Jaar and Strauss described what the images show, including a caption under each picture. Wessing has presented his own images with little or no commentary, intending that they speak for themselves.

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MoMA PS1, Sunday, November 2, 2014

Maria Alekhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, better known to the world as members of Pussy Riot, were co-winners of the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, 2014. The performance artists spent 22 months in a Russian jail in terrible conditions for their notorious anthem, “Virgin Mary, Put Putin Away,” and were released on the eve of the Sochi Olympics last year. Their film-performance of their “Punk Prayer” is part of PS1’s current exhibition “Zero Tolerance,” a show that brings to mind the alternative spirit of PS1 in its foundational years in the mid-seventies. Last month, the curator of “Zero Tolerance,” PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach, interviewed Alekhina and Tolokonnikova, and Tolokonnikova’s Russian-Canadian husband Petya Verzilov, who served as spokesman of Pussy Riot during their incarceration, in a public event which I attended.

Although I wrote an article supporting Pussy Riot in August 2012 in the Parisian paper Liberation, this was the first time I have seen them in person. Their manner and appearance were both graceful and forceful. I was impressed by their detailed attention to the Russian-English translation of their “Punk Prayer,” which they corrected several times in order to get it precisely right. At the very outset they emphasized a clear statement: they love Russia. They confirmed that they love living in Moscow, where they plan to continue their courageous activism. Their future goal, they said, is to publish an account of their time in jail and to organize performances concerning sexual issues such as homophobia in Russia. They plan to stay very active in denouncing the local justice system and conditions of imprisonment, which have not changed since the Stalinist era. Apparently the Gulag survives perfectly in Russia today. On the very first day they arrived in prison, they were beaten and dressed in clothing that would not be changed for almost two years (clothing is only changed once every three years in this prison system). In their 22 months in jail, they were never allowed minimal privacy; one noted that conditions were so bad that her menstruation cycle ceased.

When their performance prayer to the Virgin in August 2012 was interrupted, the Cathedral’s security personnel asked them to leave. It was a full week later, and based on manipulated witness accounts, that the police arrested Alekhina and Tolokonnikova, along with a third member of the band, Yekaterina Samutsevich, who was later released on a suspended sentence.

The artists said that when one is put on trial, one automatically goes to jail afterwards in virtually all cases. As the world knows, they were already incarcerated in a cage during their trial.

Pussy Riot is an artistic collective in which multiple members represent the whole. We can all be Pussy Riot, they seem to be saying: it is a state of mind. Their artistic and political activism translates itself into punk music, interviews, writing, and disguises. The group recalls the long history of agitprop, which was so creative and effective in Russia during the revolution. Indeed, their work derives specifically from that of Vladimir Mayakovski, the poet and creator of Russian Futurism, and perhaps the ultimate propagandistic agitator. This tradition of political and creative movements reaches back to the Paris Commune (1871) and the engagement of Gustave Courbet. Even earlier, it appears in Eugene Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People (1830), which presents a beautiful young topless woman with a French flag, guiding and inspiring the people at the barricades. In the 20th century, after the Russian Revolution, there are many examples of related activism, such as the amazing creative process that produced the posters during May ‘68 in Paris. The Situationist movement was composed of visual artists and philosophers who created paintings, comics, posters, and now-familiar slogans such as “la Beauté est dans la rue” (“Beauty is in the street”). Dada and Surrealism likewise contributed to their critical commitment against what Guy Debord would later call The Society of the Spectacle (the title of his 1967 book). The members of Pussy Riot studied philosophy, literature, and visual arts, and certainly read Debord.

Women play a particularly striking role in this and other related contemporary resistance movements. It’s very important to relate Pussy Riot not just to the Guerrilla Girls, but also to contemporary Muslim women in revolt against the sexism of their societies. I am thinking, for instance, of Taslima Nasrin who I met at the premiere of by Steve Lacy’s “jam opera” The Cry (1999), which sets some of her texts to music. And of Ayaan Hirsi Ali who wrote the scenario for assassinated film director Theo Van Gogh. Ali denounces the situation of women in Islam through her books and her contributions to films like Submission (2004).

In China there are extremely courageous artists like the sculptor Ai Weiwei, now in permanent household arrest, and the great writer Liu Xiaobo, an imprisoned dissident who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. Add to their number Salman Rushdie, one of the first writers to undergo a fatwa, and we have a long line of writers, filmmakers, cinema photographers, dancers, and visual artists that are explicitly expressing their sense of revolt against repressive political situations around the world.

Creation is an act of resistance. Today in our world, the resistance is against the sleekness of kitsch. Kitsch, as I define it, is a simulation of emotions and the representation of derision. The Austrian writer Hermann Broch reminded us, in his 1955 essay “Some Remarks on Kitsch,” that behind a kitsch work of art there is kitsch man and kitsch society. There is a connection between kitsch and fascism: this form of art should never be taken lightly. Creation is a political act when it’s not kitsch, but rather alive with subjectivity and emotion. A rebellious work of art is as challenging to dominant institutions as an explicitly political artwork. Both are political and complementary.

Pussy Riot received worldwide support against their imprisonment in part because the arbitrary regime of Putin is obviously complicit with the Russian Orthodox Church, notably the Patriarch Kirill. Whereas, in the West, there is no democracy without the separation of church and state, Putin has eliminated this separation. Today Pussy Riot can be arrested at any time and attacked by any nationalist individual. Last March, Alekhina and Tolokonnikova were attacked by a group of young nationalists in a restaurant in the city of Nizhny Novgorod. The thugs poured a green antiseptic liquid over the women, an action that was filmed. In Sochi, police were ready to arrest them on the basis of false accusations of stealing in their hotel. Their commitment is crucial in a world of cynicism and corruption where art is manipulated by capital. They believe in the endless symbolic power of art. This is the reason why the art world should not be silent on their actions but, on the contrary, deeply vigilant in its support of them. Theirs is a deeply artistic engagement.

Translated from French by Philip Barnard.

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This essay is published in a book that accompanies the artist’s exhibition, “because I have no interest in those questions: photographs, paintings and painted photographs” at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, 208 Forsyth Street New York City, 917-861-7312.  November 19 to December 21, 2014

What more is there to a photo than a curious and prurient glance? And yet it is also a fascinating secret. – François Laruelle, The Concept of Non-Photography, 2012.

Stuart Shils is a painter.  His very being has come to be filtered through the act, substance, and legacies of paint.  The place of photography in his life is a case in point.  That he photographs with acumen and passion, relishing what are for him new expressive possibilities, is borne out by this publication and its related show, but his photography is, as Clausewitz might have put it, the continuation of painting by other means.

A latecomer to the feast, Shils is indifferent to the order of courses.  He has a hunger, but the kind of hunger induced by nibbling, not the kind that brought him to the table in the first place. In any event, he seems impatient with gadgetry, preferring the low-tech of the iPhone even to the user-friendly pocket Leica D-5 given to him in 2007 by his friend, the late Roy Davis, the gift that launched this adventure.

The classically trained painter could have gone in different directions, applying equivalent rigors to those that are now second nature in the painting studio, or “chilling out” with the instantaneity offered by his new toy.  In any event, there is an indifference towards post-shutter finesse—the developing, editing or printing aspects of photo craft.  But that is changing, inevitably, as he prints up his images for exhibition and is forced to address issues of size and scale and texture. It is changing also in a departure in which he actually paints on photographic supports (pace Richard Hamilton or Gerhard Richter) suggesting equally painting asserting its primacy over the newfound interest or an increasingly openness to medium fluidity.  But technological ease is still essential to Shils’ belated embrace of photography.

He is a bit like those resolutely abstract painters whose photography is less the scouting for source material than it is the registering of equivalents of their form-vocabulary in the observed environment. I’m thinking of artists like Ellsworth Kelly, Sean Scully and Joe Fyfe.  Except Shils is not quite (perhaps indeed is hardly at all) an abstract painter.  His painting is always rooted in observation and experience of actual places, however generalized the sensation of looking may feel in his pared down evocations.

Another way in which the camera is subordinate to the easel in the ontology of image-formation is that his photographs are continuations of the act of painting rather than merely its resulting images. His discovery is of correlatives of painting in the layering that exists—or rather that is revealed to exist through slow looking—within the humanly built environment.  His photographic motifs often entail viewings through meshes and apertures and coming back at the viewer/photographer in mirrors or reflective panes—instances of observation that structurally mimic camera work.  In much the same way, the palimpsest of screens and frames that characterize his photographic motifs are equivalents of a painting process that is somehow at once alla prima and layered, marked equally by impressionistic responses and minutely deliberative editing, a kind of temporal push-pull that exploits dichotomies of composure and snap.

The iPhone suits the interventions of his eye upon the urban scene, as tool of communication and instantly handy jotter. A latter-day flaneur, Shils bikes around his native Philadelphia finding in its understated poetry a twin city to the Naples of Thomas Jones.  He is a wonderful guide to the underbelly of this city, as I have discovered on car rides with him, marveling at the architectural grandeur of its industrial age, offering almost archaeological insights into its social transformations.  I have dubbed him a connoisseur of slums, although his tours and evident astonishment at all he witnesses is the opposite of ruin porn.  His vision cuts through layers of renewal and decay, alerting him tosignifiers of alienation and aspiration. He is, in equal measure, aesthete and citizen.

It is odd that an artist who was a student in the 1970s managed without photography in his artistic life for so long.  Perhaps shunning the medium was a statement (to himself or the world), an affirmation of the totality of vision contained by painting and drawing.  And yet, as a teacher and voracious gallery goer, Shils is nothing if not ecumenical: give and take characterizes his attitude towards artists of all mediums.

Could it be that he had no need of the apparatus because he himself was the camera, in the Sally Bowles sense?  But that seems too cute, especially as Shils’ realism, even in his cooler, crisper earlywork, never aspired to mechanically impartial empiricism.  More likely photography seemed a distraction from the delicate ecology of looking and feeling constantly evolving in his painting practice – an unwelcome third wheel.  What has changed is not just his own security and balance but also perhaps the radically fluid, informal nature of photography itself in its post-celluloid and iPhone incarnation: with Shils and photography, medium and messenger are meeting half way.

Shils’ photography echoes the adventures of millions who use this technology almost unselfconsciously, and stands apart from the quasi-cinematic efforts of much fine art photography that exploits scale, precision and theatrical composition almost as means of distancing itself from popular use.  And yet, ironically, precisely by bringing painterly verve to iPhone quickies, Shils’ low-tech photographic imagery actually recalls the immaculately composed, attempting-to-be-painterly photography of the medium’s first half century.  His photographs, like his paintings, entail a strange chemistry of contrastive speeds.  Despite the layering and the relish in the discovery of layering, his images are a kind of suspended clarification, a sudden gestalt.  “Content is a glimpse” as de Kooning put it.

Just as his painting entails a back and forth between the painterly and the perceptual, between making and seeing, between plastic metaphor and actual moments of observation, so his photographic touch oscillates between clarity and blur, accident and set-up, purposiveness and nonchalance.  His iPhone is a weapon in the front line of seeing, in the fog of perception.

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